🚙 After losing a six-figure loyalty bonus, Mercedes-Benz of Temecula launched a mobile service van in December 2025 and texted every customer it hadn’t seen in over a year. In September, it booked 37 mobile appointments, its best month yet, and 70% of mobile customers hadn’t visited in at least a year.
🚗 Toyota Is Closing In on GM, and Hybrids Are the Reason
🚙 GM has been America's best-selling automaker every year since 1931, except for 2021. That streak is looking less certain. GM's lead over Toyota has shrunk to fewer than 130,000 vehicles through September, and fewer than 37,000 separated them in the third quarter.
🚙 The market gave used buyers a little relief, the car-loan tax break got narrower, the FTC shifted tactics, and even headlight rules are getting a rethink.
🚗 Car Loans Hit Record Lengths as Monthly Payments Keep Climbing
🚙 More buyers are stretching their loans to make a new car fit the budget, and payments are still going up. A record 25.5% of financed new-vehicle purchases in Q3 had terms of 84 months or longer, up from 21.8% a year earlier, according to Edmunds.
🚙 If a shopper at a California dealership asks what a car costs this week, the first answer now has to be the total price. The California CARS Act took effect October 1, 2026, imposing substantial new disclosure obligations on new car dealers and creating new rights for used car purchasers.
🚙 All three Detroit automakers slipped, while Honda, Hyundai, and Kia grew. But the headline Cox expected didn't happen: Ford held off Hyundai Motor Group by about 3,500 vehicles.
🚗 Q3 Sales Preview: Hybrids Are Set to Push Detroit's Share to a Record Low
🚙 The Detroit 3 have few hybrids to offer. Ford sells hybrid versions of the Maverick and F-150, GM has almost none for mainstream buyers, and Stellantis is just now rolling out its first in the new Jeep Cherokee.
🚗 Dealers Are Moving Fast on AI, With Guardrails Built In
🚙 Himanshu Khandelwal of AlixPartners suggests three: assign an employee to approve AI recommendations on pricing or repair diagnoses before they reach customers, audit AI outputs regularly, and know exactly who's accountable when the tool gets something wrong.
🚗 Ford Is Giving Work Truck Buyers a Certified Used Option
🚙 Used truck values are softening. Black Book says full-size pickups posted another week of wholesale declines above 1%, with diesel-equipped heavy-duty trucks under particular pressure from fuel prices. Ford is also modeling the program on its retail CPO effort, which is on pace for 450,000 sales this year.
🚗 The Fuel Economy Rules Are Final, and the Target Moved Slightly
🚙 Weaker standards give automakers more room to build pickups and SUVs, which carry bigger margins than smaller cars, though GM says it still plans to keep making EVs. All of this lands with gas at $4.49 a gallon, 43% higher than a year ago.
🚗 The Fuel Economy Rules Are Getting Rewritten Today
🚙 The department's own estimates show average new-vehicle costs dropping by $930, while fuel consumption rises by about 100 billion gallons and fuel spending by $185 billion through 2050.
🚙 Toyota’s robot math, Nissan’s hybrid launch, VW’s EV orders, a stalled China ban, rising loan rates, appraisal blind spots, and one very green Range Rover.
🚗 OEMs Losing Ground and Rising Loan Rates Make it Hard to Win Back
🚙 Meanwhile, financing is getting more expensive too. Treasury yields hit 20-year highs this week, and auto loan rates follow them closely. A jump from 6.35% to 8.35% on a $43,000 loan adds roughly $41 a month and over $2,900 in total interest.
🚙 Sens. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, and Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, are pushing for unanimous Senate approval this week of a bill that would permanently ban Chinese vehicle sales and manufacturing in the US. It already has 51 Senate co-sponsors and more than 100 in the House.
🚗 VW's EV Orders Just Passed Gas Cars in Germany, and People Aren't Sure What to Make of It
🚙 VW still has real problems, 100,000 planned job cuts, a struggling China business. But its first-generation EVs struggled to sell. This generation is sold out. That's a fast turn, worth remembering next time a customer says they're "just not an EV person," at least not yet.
🚗 Nissan's New Hybrid Just Launched, and the Internet Is Already Arguing About It
🚙 The all-new 2027 Rogue Hybrid debuted Monday with Nissan's e-Power system, a series hybrid where the gas engine only ever charges a battery, never touches the wheels directly. No plug required. Pricing runs $35,490 to $43,490.
🚗 Toyota Says Automating Its Factories Could Cost $6.4 Billion a Year.
🚙 Capital investment at this scale rarely just disappears into a manufacturer's margin forever. It shows up eventually, in production costs, in pricing strategy, or in the affordability conversation dealers are already having with customers this month.
🚗 GM Finally Shared Power Figures for Its New V-8s
🚙 The power numbers get customers in the door. Reliability is the question your team needs a real answer for before a customer who's already read the comments brings it up first.
🚙 GM made a confident, forward-looking bet in both cases, on removing CarPlay and on skipping straight to EVs, and reality didn't cooperate with either one. CarPlay was fixable with a software update once GM admitted the miss. The hybrid gap isn't fixable that fast. It requires actual product GM doesn't have yet.
🚙 The first-ever West Coast ASOTU CON is live for ticket sales, and pre-release access already moved before the public sale even opened this morning. That kind of early movement on a brand-new market usually means one thing: don't sit on this one.
🚙 Insurance is climbing partly because newer vehicles carry pricier-to-repair electronics, and insurers price that risk directly into premiums. Most shoppers have no idea that connection exists until they're signing paperwork. A customer walking in already primed by a scary headline isn't a lost sale. They're a customer who needs real numbers instead of anxiety doing the talking.
🚙 Ford CEO Jim Farley spent last week publicly rejecting Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's claim that Ford is too entangled with Chinese companies, over a Michigan battery plant licensing CATL technology and a Spanish plant building Geely vehicles for Europe. Farley called it a "basic misunderstanding" that a five-minute call could fix.
